Preliminary Task: Our First Group Film (Voodoo)

Sarah:

This is our first group filming along with Jessika Bloomfield (http://typhoonproduction.blogspot.co.uk/) who joined us for this task. We worked well as we were all included in the acting. filming and editing. The short thriller film included a variety of thriller conventions along with a wide range of camera angles and effects. Some of the thriller conventions include the concealment of when the girl has her hood on and you don't see her to start with, there is suspense before the girl with the voodoo doll starts to talk, also there is an enigma code for the voodoo doll because you can tell that something bad will happen. Also we used wide angles, close ups, point of view shots, and the 180 degree rule to put together the film.
Characters- Jack Taylor-Balls - Guy that found the girl doing the voodoo, Sarah Drury - The girl doing voodoo, Harmony Shaw - The girl that had voodoo done to her and Jessika Bloomfield - The girls friend in class.

Jack:
Preliminary task set by exam board.
Voodoo gave us, as a group a chance to experiment with the shots and features of the HD camera.
Jessika helped out with the short film which was great as we could therefore all learn from the different techniques we already knew and could work as a group to discover new ideas and techniques. There were certain rules and regulations that we had to include such as a 180 degree shot, a door opening and someone walking through it in two different angles, a person walking across a room and then taking a seat and engaging conversation with another character. In some groups the character who did all these actions was the same person or two people. However we decided that the person opening the door and walking through and across the room (me) would then have a conversation with the evil voodoo girl(Sarah). We then thought Jess and Harmony should have a conversation between each other and the camera should cut between the two on going conversations. This adding tension and incorporating all actors in the film. When it came to Filming and Editing we all did some shooting and got a feel for the camera. In editing the film we all took part and shared the editing and ideas for effects and soundtrack.
All together I think it is a very good film for a first AS level task and I think as a group we can learn from certain areas of the film and make an even better final thriller.

Harmony
This is our preliminary task which we filmed together as a good. We equally took part in filming, editing and even acting in the film. The preliminary task gave us the opportunity to play around with the HD camera, and editing software (in this case imovie). I think our preliminary task went well, we included everything that was asked from us this included;180 degree shot, a door opening and someone walking through it in two different angles, a person walking across a room and then taking a seat and having an conversation with another character. I think we did quite a good job of these tasks as we made the opening of the door look continuos which was what was asked of us. We also tried to include many common conventions of thriller films, examples of these conventions in our preliminary task are the dark lighting in the locker room to present the idea of mystery. All in all I think our preliminary task went well however, from doing this task I have learnt that imovie is very limiting on the editing side therefore for our actual thriller film we will use a more advancedediting software so we can use more advanced editing techniques. From doing this task we, as a group have learnt what sort of things we need to improve on and what sort of things we need to avoid doing in our actual thriller film.